Art-Centric Trip to Quebec

Given that I had already photographed many, but not all of her artworks, we had unfinished business to do before she left for her master’s in New York. So every day during our trip, we packed one of her artworks in the car to go photograph it somewhere on-location. I had a blast trying to bring these sculptures to life by photographing them in the wild.

For our trip to the massive Sainte-Anne de Beaupré cathedral, we brought Lumen, her wooden halo inspired by Gothic rosette windows. It took us a while to find a statue of the Virgin Mary, but we finally found one and she was thrilled to have a halo stuck behind her head.

As early as our first conversation together, Pam and I were talking about En-Serre-Moi, her 8-foot wooden camming device for climbing, and she mentioned then that she really wanted to bring it with her and photograph it while rock climbing. So 4 months later, there we were, hiking to the rock facade in Val Bélair with her massive sculpture for this wonderfully absurd shoot, to the amazement and confusion of the other climbers out there.

As we’re lifting the heavy sculpture up on over precarious rocky ledge, she says “Don’t worry about the sculpture too much, we just need to make sure that no one dies and we’re good.” Thanks Pam, that’s reassuring.

For her telescope, we played around with long exposures at night in this field. I love this one—if you press on the bellows connected to the telescope, a puff of sawdust (stardust?) will fill the barrel.

The rest of the trip still revolved around art—we visited the Museum of Fine Arts of Québec, we hung out with Pam's artist mentors, and got a poutine before saying bye.

Right now, she's getting her studio set up and got her own scroll saw. She has tons of sheets of veneer waiting to be transformed. Can't wait to see what she comes up with next!

Thanks for reading! This post was my latest Postcard from Alex, an occasionally monthly photo newsletter.